Jon Swaine is the Daily Telegraph's New York correspondent. He was a
member of the MPs' expenses reporting team.

Joe Biden and the nuclear bomb

Six years ago, when Joe Biden, the now-Democratic vice-Presidential candidate, was Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he challenged the heads of various national laboratories to build an atomic bomb and then bring it into the Senate to show him. They did.

Sen. Biden takes up the story: "As we used to say when I was a kid, it was bigger than a breadbox and smaller than a dump truck but they were able to get it in. They literally put it in a room and showed and explained how â€”literally off-the-shelf, without doing anything illegal â€” they actually constructed this device."